Just some thoughts
kilts_knave said:
This card is about Divine love as the Love card about congress, or Eros. I would like to extend the idea of Charity as brotherly love, or Philia, for personal reasons. [Can someone please point me in the right "theosophic" {if this is the correct term} direction here?]
I don’t know if this helps, but there is a ‘bardic’ split of one fundamental tree-letter into two separate runes, mirrored in Greek, and I find the symbols involved quite instructive. The letter G-gort-ivy (gimel) represents desire and the number
ten (X LaRoue deFortune). In runic it branched into
j and
y sounds called, respectively, ‘gift’ (our word
give, more or less) and ‘harvest’ (our word
year): desire to bestow versus desire to acquire, the second (one hopes) arising from the first. ‘Gift’—like Greek chi, the initial of
Christ—is an X-shape. From a
g used in North Africa in which the X has a ‘lid’ (horizontal closing the top), it is apparent that this character—which could not have horizontals when carved across grain—represents the cauldron of plenty (which according to Brito-Sarmatian tradition rejects the unworthy, like the Grail), on its stand.
‘Harvest’ is two interlocked crescents that
look like a G more or less and picture the interlocked arms of the harvest dance, I take it. This is the acquisitive desire, on which the other depends for execution (wisdom, for instance, cannot be imparted until gained), which is how it originates
out of the other. In Greek, it is gamma, profile of a man’s legs surmounted by his erection (forgive the crudeness), for in North Africa (Libyan and tifinag) it is a vertical line with a dot on either side of the base (the male organ).
Semitic gimel as ‘camel’ carries both gift and acquisition (the former in the original story of ‘wise men out of the east’, no doubt) and meanders like ivy. The split of G-ivy (wanderer, desirer) was probably meant to show the interdependence of the two but has degenerated into striving to
appear generous, which is not the same as true generosity.
As to flame in hand, in the image in the middle it looks like it represents nature, which brings us to:
DoctorArcanus said:
* III Lenpio - Sola Busca deck: it is not clear who this character represents and what is the meaning of the flame.
* 43 Venus - Mantegna: According to Edgard Wind, the three graces represent chastity, beauty and love.
Marco
Marco, in the Lenpio also the ‘flame’ seems to picture nature’s growth (vegetation).
The other image is quite striking. The flame there is vegetation also, but its threefold nature and the three branches, since these are held by the middle and right of the three, means these are: the Holy Spirit (thinker, or part of greater self that deals with things of finite duration) and Father (knower, the part that deals with things eternal), which do not undergo the Fall, the third one (on the left) being the Son (doer, who acts in the durationless present), who does (undergo the Fall) and who has therefore lost touch
consciously with the Trinity itself, that is, with the greater
threefold self of which it is merely
part (as in “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”). This is not blasphemy but Gnosticism. Since the images for the body (in the water) and three parts of the self (the Graces) are all female (I gather), it evidently refers to alchemy and the transformation of (one’s)
nature, Cupid representing the false attraction of the outward (leftward, receptive) as a
false (i.e. premature) male, the real male being the three (or four) male counterparts of these four, being matured somewhere ‘in parallel’.
K
